And here I should like to put something on record. Not from any strutting conceit, but rather with a mild sense of wonder. I’ve never yet made the first advances to any woman. It isn’t as though I’ve known only one class of woman—not by any means. But from little prostitutes and kept women and elderly widows and shop girls and wives of respectable men, and even advanced modern literary ladies at the most select dinners and soirées (I’ve been there), I’ve met invariably with not only the same readiness, but with the same positive invitation. It surprised me at first. I used to look across the table and think “Is that very distinguished young lady, discussing _le Kipling_ with the gentleman with the brown beard, really pressing my foot?” And I was never really certain until I had pressed hers. Curious, isn’t it? I don’t look at all like a maiden’s dream. . . . I am little and light with an olive skin, black eyes with long lashes, black silky hair cut short, tiny square teeth that show when I smile. My hands are supple and small. A woman in a bread shop once said to me: “You have the hands for making fine little pastries.” I confess, without any clothes I am rather charming. Plump, almost like a girl, with smooth shoulders, and I wear a thin gold bracelet above my left elbow. But, wait! Isn’t it strange I should have written all that about my body and so on? It’s the result of my bad life, my submerged life. I am like a little woman in a café who has to introduce herself with a handful of photographs. “Me in my chemise, coming out of an eggshell. . . . Me upside down in a swing, with a frilly behind like a cauliflower. . . .” You know the things. If you think what I’ve written is merely superficial and impudent and cheap you’re wrong. I’ll admit it does sound so, but then it is not all. If it were, how could I have experienced what I did when I read that stale little phrase written in green ink, in the writing-pad? That proves there’s more in me and that I really am important, doesn’t it? Anything a fraction less than that moment of anguish I might have put on. But no! That was real. “Waiter, a whisky.” I hate whisky. Every time I take it into my mouth my stomach rises against it, and the stuff they keep here is sure to be particularly vile. I only ordered it because I am going to write about an Englishman. We French are incredibly old-fashioned and out of date still in some ways. I wonder I didn’t ask him at the same time for a pair of tweed knickerbockers, a pipe, some long teeth and a set of ginger whiskers. “Thanks, _mon vieux._ You haven’t got perhaps a set of ginger whiskers?” “No, monsieur,” he answers sadly. “We don’t sell American drinks.” And having smeared a corner of the table he goes back to have another couple of dozen taken by artificial light. Ugh! The smell of it! And the sickly sensation when one’s throat contracts.